


heat waves

by lady_mab



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Dreamsharing, F/F, Just gals being pals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29418351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_mab/pseuds/lady_mab
Summary: In total, Gertrude and Agnes only meet twice in person: Once, to make the arrangement, and once to agree that it must end.Beneath all that, out of sight of the Eye and away from the light of the Flame, they meet often.(For the TMA Valentine's Day Event)
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: TMA Valentine's Exchange 2021





	heat waves

**Author's Note:**

> You just need a better life than this  
> You need something I can never give  
> Fake water all across the road  
> It's gone now the night has come but  
> Sometimes, all I think about is you  
> Late nights in the middle of June  
> Heat waves been faking me out  
> Can't make you happier now  
> \- [Glass Animals' 'Heat Waves'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT7F15T9VBI&ab_channel=GlassAnimals)

In total, Gertrude and Agnes only meet twice in person: Once, to make the arrangement, and once to agree that it must end. 

Beneath all that, out of sight of the Eye and away from the light of the Flame, they meet often. But it is never a large thing. Never two queens on a chessboard dodging in and out of the way of their pawns. Not titans clashing and leaving devastation in their wake. 

Instead, it is as simple and as small as a candle. 

_Light it, and think of me_ , the note that comes with it reads. It’s not signed, but it doesn’t have to be. It smells like ash, and leaves soot over Gertrude’s fingers as she considers it. 

A risk, to send it to the Archives, but Agnes doesn’t know where she lives. Doesn’t have any way of finding that out without alerting any of her followers. 

_Light it, and think of me_. Deceptively simple instructions, Gertrude thinks, because she can’t actually bring herself to set flame to wick. 

She has come close, several times. Let the match burn down to the tips of her fingers, as she sits on the edge of her bed and contemplates the candle on her table. There is a graveyard of spent matches in the wastebasket, and a new scorch mark on her duvet from the time she dropped a still burning match. 

What does it mean to light the candle? What does it mean that she hasn’t lit it, but still thinks of Agnes anyway? Of her voice, low and crackling like hidden embers, the brittle quirk of her smile like a snapping twig, the dull and painful throb of the heat where their hands touched. 

It’s a day in June, nearly five months after receiving the candle. Not that long, in the grand scheme of things, but Agnes is a woman who burns at both ends. What drags for Gertrude could be gone in a flash for Agnes. 

It’s a day in June, hot and sweltering, where the air doesn’t shift and the fan is useless. Where she strips down as much as she can but still the sweat clings to her, plasters her hair to the back of her neck. Where she feels sick, tangled in her sheets at 2AM, thinking about her alarm going off in three and a half hours, knowing that there is no relief. 

It’s a day in June, and she can’t stop thinking about Agnes — does she enjoy days like this? Does the weather bother her the same way it does Gertrude? Does she think of Gertrude on days like today, thinking that _perhaps now she will understand, just a little, how I feel every damn day of my life_. 

So, unable to sleep, delirious with the heat, thinking of Agnes, Gertrude lights the candle. 

* * *

“I was beginning to think that you simply wouldn’t come,” Agnes says. She’s seated in a chair much like the one at the cafe where they had met, but instead of a cup of perpetually boiling coffee, her long, slender fingers are wrapped around a bowl of ice. 

“I shouldn’t have,” Gertrude argues with a shrug, and sits down across from her. She’s dressed as she was that day at work, thank god, not in the sweaty cami and underwear she tried to sleep in. 

Agnes pushes the bowl of ice across the table. “Here.” 

Gertrude considers it, the chips still cool and frosty as she reaches in to take one. “They haven’t melted with your touch.” 

“Things are different here.” She rests her chin in her hand and watches with burning intensity as Gertrude slips the chip of ice into her mouth. “Our bodies remember, but our surroundings do not.” 

“Is this safe?” 

“Nothing is. You know that better than most.” 

Gertrude gives another shrug, not thinking about the underlying trace of disappointment that she feels. It mirrors the one in Agnes’ voice. “How long do I have?” 

A ghost of a smile flickers across Agnes lips, there and gone again in the span of a blink. “I do not think I'm qualified for such esoteric questions, all things considered.” Her laugh is a candle flame, tenuous and wavering. “Oh, you don’t like that answer do you?”

“I would appreciate it if you weren’t quite so cryptic. I get enough of that at work.” 

“I apologize,” Agnes says. “I only ever speak to people who expect such things from me. This is new.” She hesitates, considering, then she lowers her hand to cover Gertrude’s. 

There’s an instant where her brain sparks, warns her of the incoming pain, but then the touch is nothing but soft and warm — the way any hand laid against another should be. There is no blistering, no immediate withdrawal, no punishment for closing the distance. 

“Like I said.” Agnes’ voice drops to a whisper, and she turns Gertrude’s hand over to trace a finger down the center of her palm. There is a look of concentration on her brow, as if she is studying the lines and shapes and weight in a way she had never been able to before. “Our bodies remember. But this space does not play by the same rules.” 

Gertrude doesn’t say anything. She reaches into the bowl with her other hand and selects a piece of ice. Her fingers circle around Agnes’ wrist, and the other woman goes still in anticipation. 

There is a bite of cold, the way ice chips are when gripped for too long. Idly, indulgently, Gertrude traces the tip of the ice cube from Agnes’ wrist, let’s it swirl across her palm, teasing the space between her fingers. 

Agnes gasps at the chill, but doesn’t pull away. 

“I see,” Gertrude muses, but then the candle gutters and goes out, and she wakes groggily as her bedside clock bleats in protest. 

She stares up at her ceiling, uncertain of what she’s looking at, until her brain and her body realign and she remembers. With a sigh, she rubs a hand over her exhausted face. 

The tips of her fingers are still cold from the ice. 

* * *

Work that day is excruciating. 

Gertrude feels like every nerve is on fire, and not in the way that her body responds to Agnes’ touch. She can feel the gaze of every pair of eyes lancing into her, prying and struggling to find this answer that she knows better than to give up. 

Let them try. 

But the day drags, and it is a scratch between her shoulders that she can’t get rid of. 

When she gets home, blessedly silent, blessedly alone, she almost throws out the candle. 

It’s in her hand, the metal tin that it came in cool to the touch despite the sweltering heat of the room. Her muscles are tensed, ready to… 

To throw it— 

away, at the wall, out her window so that it would arc gracefully and wildly over her balcony railing and land somewhere in the festering gutter between buildings. 

She doesn’t. 

She notices that the wick isn’t burned at all, the wax still unblemished, as if every agonizing minute of every hour leading up to her lighting the candle the night before was completely meaningless. That she never set fire to it. 

As if her thoughts of Agnes were always only just that: Thoughts. 

_Light it, and think of me._

She had, hadn’t she? 

Gertrude sighs and sets the candle back down on her bedside table. “It’s the damn heat,” she tells her empty flat. “Playing tricks.” 

Is that one of the powers of the Desolation? No, it couldn’t be, it is simply the summer heat. 

She takes a cold shower and scrubs the remains of the day and the dream from her skin. 

She doesn’t light the candle. 

* * *

The candle remains unlit for another three weeks. The only change is the way that the faintest layer of dust settles over the wax. 

She tells herself it is because she ran out of matches, though she doesn’t know how that could have happened. Had she spent an entire book on merely thinking about lighting the candle? 

Then, unable to wait any longer, Gertrude uses a cheap lighter she bought at the corner store three days before. 

The candle doesn’t smell like anything, but she falls asleep thinking of sandalwood, crushed peonies, and ash. 

* * *

Agnes sits beside her on a barstool, in a bar that is empty but feels crowded. It is only the two of them, but they are pressed shoulder to shoulder, and Agnes has her head bent in towards Gertrude as if to better hear her over the clamor of absent conversation. 

“I am glad that nothing happened,” Agnes says, her hair shifting and shivering over her shoulder. 

Gertrude thinks that it smells of sandalwood, crushed peonies, and ash. “How did you know?”

She runs her finger around the edge of her glass, the two fingers of gin rippling at the subtle motion. “That the Beholding would not know?” 

After a pause, where Gertrude considers what she wants to get to drink and a glass of gin identical to Agnes’ appears at her elbow, she nods. 

“A flame once lit that never goes out tends to burn hot.” 

Gertrude snorts into her drink. “What have I told you about being cryptic?” 

Agnes laughs, leaning away, as if this is the answer that she wanted and is delighted to have earned it. “I’m sorry,” she says, without really sounding like she means it. She rests her cheek in the palm of one hand, regarding Gertrude with idle interest. 

Gertrude allows it, because this is the spark behind the Eternal Flame. This is the woman who would exist, without the mantle draped over her shoulders. Gertrude knows she would always be this angry person that she is, even without the Archives, without the Beholding. 

But here, in this space that doesn’t exist within the confines of their rules, Agnes can just _be_.

And she can touch things without consequence, a fact that she puts to practice as soon as she meets Gertrude’s gaze at the conclusion of her study. 

She reaches out and lets the tips of her fingers brush away a stray curl. “I hope you do not mind,” she says, voice taking on that dreamy quality it had during their first meeting. One that Gertrude thinks means that she is amazed by something. That things are going the way she wanted, but never hoped for. “That candle made its mark on you.” 

_A mark._ What she had been trying to avoid, trying to keep herself free of despite the way that the Institute demands it of her. 

Gertrude starts to draw away, remembering the pain of the touch, the stifling heat of a burning building filling her lungs. There is that itch between her shoulders, like fingers down her spine, and she— 

Agnes lunges after, desperation not aggression in the action. “No, I’m sorry. Don’t. Don’t think of that,” she says, and it’s an order. Her hands clasp Gertrude on either side of the head, and there is a shift in atmosphere as her ears pop. Agnes closes her eyes and rests their forehead together. “The Eye is looking for you. If you open yourself up to it, it will find you.” 

“What did you do?” Gertrude asks, her voice rasping like she’s got a smoker’s cough. “That candle, just now… all of it. I don’t like not knowing.” 

“I know,” Agnes says softly, running her hand back through Gertrude’s hair. “I know, but here, you cannot use your powers. Neither of us can. Once it is seen, once the flame catches… there is no going back.” 

“Easier said than done.” 

“I have ways of distracting you, should that happen.” Agnes’ mouth is very close, her breath warm and comforting without feeling like a trap. Without feeling like it could be a mistake, the same way it felt when Gertrude looked at it during their meeting in the cafe. 

There is a beat before the tension eases from Gertrude’s shoulders, and another before Agnes releases her to return to her own stool. 

Agnes takes a sip of her gin, then rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand holding the glass. “What I meant to say is that… we have already twined ourselves together, Gertrude. And I wish to offer you protection, the way you have offered me freedom.” 

Gertrude almost laughs at that. “ _Freedom_?” she echoes. “How much longer do I have before Jude comes to burn down my flat?” 

“What do you think this is?” Agnes waves a hand airily at the bar around them. “It is only for us. And they cannot see us here.” 

“And what is this protection?” 

Agnes puts down her glass and reaches out to take Gertrude’s hand in her own. “The ties that bind us will burn if anyone but you tries to touch them. I can push that further, so that if anyone tries to see you when you do not wish it, I will burn them also.” 

Gertrude considers this, considers the vehemence in Agnes’ quiet voice. On how, for a moment, she can feel that fire pressed against the back of her hand. “I would think that would give your position in all of this away.” 

“If he cared to know, he would regret it,” she says, voice hissing through her gritted teeth. “Push back if he presses. If anyone tries to tell you no, not just the Eye.” 

“Because having compulsion powers isn’t enough…” Gertrude mutters. 

With an airy sigh, Agnes reaches up and lets the tips of her fingers graze back over Gertrude’s cheek. “You don’t like using them, do you? You are a smart woman. You know what reliance on them means.” 

“And reliance on you is better?” 

Agnes returns her stare evenly, even as her fingers continue to trace the same path over Gertrude’s cheek. “You already lit the candle,” she points out. “Twice.” 

Gertrude can feel the desire to push, to know, but doesn’t give in to the urge. “I wasn’t aware at the time that it meant it was you or the Eye.”

“Would you have picked differently if you _had_ known?” 

_Of course not_ , Gertrude almost says, but she can see the hint of the smirk playing at the corner of Agnes’ lips and decides not to give her the satisfaction. 

So instead she leans in to close the distance between them, to give her answer on a kiss. Agnes tastes like gin and sweltering summer nights, and Gertrude already knew she would never pick any other way the moment the two of them sat across from each other at that table.

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [tumblr user helenisadoorable](https://helenisadoorable.tumblr.com/), who requested
>
>> Young Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson falling in love. Dreamsharing or secretly meeting would be cool. I love it when they’re soul bond, and how it influences their desolation and beholding powers respectively, plays into it. I also love angst.
> 
> Hey, is it gay to soul bind yourself to a rival power in order to directly subvert the wishes and desires those powers have for you? asking for a friend.


End file.
